UNICEF

UNICEF started its operations in the Republic of Korea (ROK) in 1948 right after the establishment of the country. In 1950, three months before the onset of the Korean War, UNICEF began an Emergency Relief Programme for Korean children and mothers, which later became a full-scale programme of cooperation.

For 45 years, UNICEF and the Government and people of Korea jointly supported Korean children and mothers to meet their needs in the health, education, nutrition and other sectors (e.g., providing medicine for leprosy/tuberculosis and training water supply practitioners, etc.) in order to ensure that they could achieve their full potential. The total amount of aid Korea received from UNICEF for about 40 years from 1950 to 1993 was about USD 23 million.

In the 1990s, the Republic of Korea graduated from a recipient of UNICEF’s funding to a donor country. In 1994, the Korean Committee for UNICEF (KCU) was established, which leads UNICEF’s efforts in fundraising from general public and the private sector, as well as child rights advocacy. In 2017, UNICEF further strengthened its partnership with ROK by opening UNICEF’s Seoul Liaison Office, an extension of UNICEF’s Public Partnerships Division in the Headquarters, which manages UNICEF’s partnerships with the government of the Republic of Korea, the National Assembly, and other UN agencies and inter-governmental organizations based in the Republic of Korea.

The Republic of Korea is a proud member of UNICEF’s Executive Board for nearly 23 years. ROK is one of UNICEF’s top government donors, through which UNICEF had already reached more than 75 million vulnerable children worldwide by the end of 2020. UNICEF is also the leading UN agency with one of the highest numbers of Korean national staff: 120 in 2019 alone.